In the field of data processing, there is an ever increasing demand for graphics applications which are faster, more detailed, and generally more lifelike than their predecessors. Many of these applications are useful in personal, educational, military, and commercial data processing systems. In addition, the rapid acceleration of Internet applications is mandating high performance graphics and multimedia features in newly released computer systems.
High speed three-dimensional (3D) graphics processing requires fast, pipe-lined processing in order to provide realistic geometric detail and to “light” objects in a scene with special attributes such as transparency, depth, color, intensity, reflectivity, fill, texture, and so forth. Newer microprocessors, such as the Pentium® III processor, commercially available from Intel Corporation of Santa Clara, Calif., that provide streaming single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) instructions for floating-point data as part of their instruction sets, are particularly well adapted to implement high speed 3D graphics.
Graphics processing architectures must support both the intense computational workload required for geometric transformations and lighting, as well as the increasingly high bus bandwidth load required to access data and instructions from memory to support these computations. To be commercially successful, processors used in personal computers must be able to fulfill these computational and bandwidth requirements while keeping the hardware cost very low.
High output bandwidth has until now implied high cost memory for storing the large amounts of data required to implement high-speed 3D graphics features, such as realistically rendering moving objects within a scene on a computer screen.
For the reasons stated above, there is a substantial need in the area of computer graphics processing to provide a graphics processing system which can realistically render scenes involving moving objects while minimizing computational and bandwidth loads and memory resources.
In addition, there is a substantial need in the area of computer graphics processing to provide a computer-based method of effectively creating a motion illusion of one or more objects being displayed in a computer graphics scene.